Hello, and welcome to Barcelona. We all last glimpsed this place way back in 1988 for the Olympics.... unless you've been here since.
We arrived with no problems. We then set off to find our hotel. We figured out which bus to get, and once we were in the vicinity we started looking at our internet print-out map of the city. We wandered around for a while with our heavy backpacks (i overpacked as usual) and couldn't find the place. So... after trying to convince a taxi driver to take us there (he refused, said it was just over the street) we wandered back to the information, and they pointed us in the right direction.
Our hotel was right near the La-Rambla, which is a long street that goes right through the centre of town. It's full of restaurants, stalls selling stuff, street performers, and beggars.
One of the first interesting sights is below:
Yep, it's a devil man with a devil dog, playing wind pipe thingames.
Soon after that, Tram found a fresh food market:
Tram couldn't convince me to try any of it though. It was mainly exotic seafood :) Although, I did see some lollies... nah.
Further down La Ramblas, we decided to take a side-street and see where it went, and we came across this girl doing Flamenco dancing.
Right at the end of La Ramblas (it's very long) is the port. It has a big artificial island in the middle of it with shops, restaurants and lots of night-clubs and the occasional pub too. This shot is pointing back to the mainland, so you can't see it. Not that impressive anyway.
We went to the beach. Can you see any topless girls in this photo?? I had a long look, can't see any. There were heaps though, trust me. It's normal in Spain, and in many other European countries for the girls to go topless. All good fun :)
A band along the beach that we watched for a while, while drinking Spanish beer and sangria.
Da beach. The fish thingy is a casino.
After getting back from clubbing (yep, long first day.. there's so much to see :)) we stopped in this square about 30 seconds from our hotel and took some piccys of the fountains. That's not our hotel in the background (dang).
Day 2: time for some guided sight-seeing.
This is La Pedrera, a building designed by the famous architect Antonia Gaudi. It's all organic and curvy, very unique and amazing.. have to go there to appreciate it.
On the roof of La Pedrera
More of the roof.
The Sagrada Familias church. It's been being built for 200 years, and they recon it's got about 25 to go. It's huge, and impressive, but on the inside there's a few walls missing. We decided not to walk up the many hundreds of steps to the top of one of the spires.
...
Tram, about 3 quarters of the way up the Tribidabo mountain. It's the tallest mountain that's close to Barcelona, and you get pretty good views. Please don't go up here though (unless you have lots of time).. it's really not that interesting. There are better things to do.
On the top of the Tribidabo mountain.
There is a theme park at the top... this is an inverted.. well, extremely slow roller coaster, going over the top of the Funicular (a kind of train that goes up steep mountains.)
The theme park at the top of the world : )
The Barcelona Cathedral. As usual, the stuff we want to see always has scaffolding on it. This has a particularly large amount of the stuff.
Stiges (sounds like sitches), a small town about half an hour from Barcelona by train. It's was very picturesque. And hot. And nice little shops. We went for a swim.. the water was a bit cold.. the sand was VERY hot.
You have to hire the chairs and the tent things. We are thinking of starting the same kind of thing on the coast somewhere, but somehow I think Aussies would just use them without paying :) Maybe if they have to go to a hut to get them...
Check out my cannon ;)
That's all the photos we have to put up. It was a really fun time. You could spend ages in Spain. We are going there again in 4 weeks (October), but to Madrid this time. We are going to be using the same railway that got bombed... so... 'twill be interesting.
If anyone still reads this after our long silence, we implore you to comment and let us know what you think!
We love you all! We miss anyone we haven't seen for more than a month!
Paul and Tram
